Hey all,
Just wanted to share my very first (and very simple) print with the Form 2. I used grey resin and have yet to post-process. If anyone is familiar with La Victoire de Samothrace, located in the Musée de Louvre, this is my favorite statue and now I have a tiny replica sitting on my desk.
I’m excited to learn more CAD to be able to render my own designs, especially with more detail, but for this one I grabbed the stl file from online.
Tips appreciated for moving forward with more prints!
You have something to be proud of!
For mechanical objects, I know Solidworks is a good tool, but it costs a bunch. Perhaps the monthly plan for Autodesk 360 Fusion is affordable, and has training available.
Z-brush is what I have heard of for fantasy figures and more organic shapes.
Bon Voyage!
Fusion360 is my go to tool, and it’s free for many users (hobbyists/start-ups making less than $100k/yr, students and educators). It’s a really robust CAD package, and I prefer it to any other free option that exists. I use it for mechanical work, cosplay prop design and even light sculpting.
Sculptris is a good, free alternative to Zbrush while you’re getting started. Zbrush isn’t all that expensive (not compared to Solidworks at least!), but you may want to try your hand with free software packages for a bit and see what you want to stick with before spending money.
Soldworks is expensive unless someone else is buying it for you
Fusion360’s monthly plan adds up and as ALL autocad products expect a price increase at some point.
Rhino 5 is a one time cost much less expensive than Solidworks and has a many more features than I will ever use.
If you don’t have lots of CAD experience, then try a direct modeller like Spaceclaim. Easy to use, good plug-in for handling meshes and facetted data and relatively inexpensive. Solidworks is great for mechanical design work but is steeper learning curve, doesn’t like large mesh files and is very slow to model compared with Fusion 360 or Spaceclaim.
Our workflow for reverse engineering is to do most stuff in Geomagic Design X (great but expensive) but then do 3D prep like shelling, infill and Boolean ops, making moulds etc. in Spaceclaim. Fast, easy to learn and relatively cheap.
